You’re welcome Branko, I’ll try to find some ‘real time’ examples but from the original discussion on the HOT mailing list it seemed to be mostly noticed in Central and Southern Africa. Jubal Harpster was part of that discussion then, not sure if he is still with Bing, but might have some better insight. I’ve also asked on the HOT Slack if anyone has good, recent, examples of Bing being less useful in areas they’re mapping. So hopefully others can chime in and help define the scope of the issue.

Hello Branko!

When I first started volunteering for HOT in 2012, and for many years, we considered Bing the ‘defacto’ imagery to align mapping with. I think somewhere around 2017 there was a major update to the global imagery that introduced a significant offset to many areas. When we reached out the answer was basically ‘the imagery is within the expected specifications’ and ever since, we haven’t had a ‘global standard’ for imagery alignment. I do believe offset has improved bit by bit over the last handful of years but my wish would be that we could again recommend that Bing be used as the default imagery to align too, even if it’s not the highest resolution or most recent.

Thank you for the opportunity to chime in and no worries if priorities go another direction.

Thank you Feye and all the organizers! It was a great conference.

Thank you for the report Harry, always helpful to see the results - and shortcomings - of our OpenStreetMap initiatives!

Welcome to OpenStreetMap - there is a lot to learn, you may find some allies and helpful people at the new Discourse forum: https://community.openstreetmap.org/

There’s also a Slack for OpenStreetMap (run by and mostly used by OSM US): https://slack.openstreetmap.us/

And there’s tons of information on the OSM wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/

Hope you can find your way from there, Happy Mapping!

Thank you for this Pete! As one of the people at HOT that has tried to steward the Tasking Manager from version to version, I can say that another thing that is well within our sphere of influence is to have a longer testing and documentation period for major releases and new features. For both version 3 and version 4 it really felt like we had a grossly inadequate amount of time to test and many issues that we could have potentially caught were not anticipated and the versions released only to have to back-track and clean up after the fact. Of course there are always budget and deadline constraints but as our partners in Missing Maps, among others, can recall - we were literally creating their organizations and trying to teach them about the new Organization and Teams structure in version 4 just weeks before the release. Only to still have today many users who don’t know that we have moved away from the role structure to teams. Anyway, mostly all good progress being made, but as you outline, a significant amount of issues to keep working on, especially in regards to that mapper, community, organization collaboration.

Welcome Uyan, thank you for your contribution. Just a prelude to intermediate mapping, it is up to the project manager to decide the difficulty. However, they can also set a project as intermediate or advanced difficulty, but not make the restriction (i.e. bit of a warning to new mappers vs. too difficult).

Some things that I look at are imagery - if it is offset, poor resolution or a need to compare two (or more) imagery sources - that I consider a bit beyond a new mapper. Very dense buildings - often with very dense buildings and/or poor resolution it is difficult for even experienced mappers to determine where one building ends and another begins. Multiple features - this one often happens even in beginner projects, but is a cue to me to make a project intermediate or advanced as it’s just more difficult if you have to be looking for more than one thing in a task.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of course, there may be other factors the project creator is looking at when determining the difficulty level.

Happy Mapping, we’ll see you soon on the more difficult projects!

=Russ

Russell Deffner

Russell.Deffner@hotosm.org

Quality Assurance and Control will be a topic discussed thoroughly at the HOT Summit, maybe we can have a Birds of a Feather on this specifically, or just over drinks? What I disagree with is the mindset/methodology of approve/disapprove in general. I understand that at some level that is what we are doing during validation; but I’ve always taken, and taught, the methodology of improve/improve – meaning that whether or not you eventually decide to validate or invalidate a task, you should have taken the time to explain, in enough detail for a new mapper to grasp, what needs/you fixed in the task. And often, it seems easier and more effective to take time to fix things, so the mapper can learn from you, rather than rapidly concluding ‘this needs more work’. Unfortunate truth is it just rubs a lot of people the wrong way to get the ‘your task has been invalidated’ message. However, if/when we do change “invalidated” to something like ‘needs more work’ on the Tasking Manager, then I would be a little more ok with the rapid approve/disapprove approach. Although personally will always give more of my time to helping a mapper than focusing on data quality.

I respectfully disagree. I believe validating is about making both the mapper, and the map, better.

Thank you!

Hello hesidoryn, I see you haven’t made any edits yet. It’s easy to get started, for some guidance, check out http://learnosm.org

Happy Mapping!

=Russ

Hi Minh, thank you for making me chuckle this morning :) Happy 10th OSM-iversary!

=Russ

Hi Marcus, welcome to OpenStreetMap! You might next visit: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area,_California - join the mailing list and/or meetup and if you’re a wiki editor as well, you might add yourself to the users in the bay area list.

Happy Mapping!

=Russ

Hi Clifford, I’m hoping to make time for a 2018 aspirations post but I did already buy my ticket for State of the Map Milan; so now just fingers crossed I can afford the rest of the trip :) Haven’t added Detroit to the line-up yet, but about 75% likelihood I’ll be going back to Dar Es Salaam for FOSS4G and the HOT Summit in August. I’ll leave it there before this becomes that post ;)

=Russ

I disagree butrus_butrus and welcome the discussion.

Thank you Luis and team!

Welcome to OSM, I sent you a direct message with some links and info.

Happy Mapping!

=Russ

Hi Sunfishtommy,

I’m the project manager for the HOT Malaria Elimination mapping. We are working on the validation and clean-up of the mapping. We have a lot of student mappers so hopefully their work will improve as we progress. Thanks for the patience and feel free to jump in to help!

=Russ

Russell.Deffner@hotosm.org

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

Thank you mutenyo joan!

@PBJomel - Project 2396 is part of a collection of mapping projects to provide building footprints, as well as basemap, for the Clinton Health Access Initiative’s campaign to eliminate malaria. They will use the data to plan and conduct various malaria interventions.

Stay tuned to the HOT communication channels for more information and new projects.

Hi, the HOT Activation group has been monitoring the typhoon. However, we not yet received any requests from response or aid organizations, so it’s unlikely we will activate. Although we could help the local mappers by creating projects. Stay tuned and/or feel free to message the HOT mailing list